UPTON, NY — Megan Connors, a Stony Brook University (SBU) graduate student, has been awarded the 2011 Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Prize, consisting of $1,000 and a framed certificate. Currently funded by Brookhaven Science Associates, the company that manages Brookhaven National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy, the award was established in 1992 by Brookhaven Women in Science (BWIS), a nonprofit organization that supports and encourages the advancement of women in science.

The award recognizes substantial promise and accomplishment by women graduate students in physics who are performing their thesis research at Brookhaven Lab, or who are enrolled at SBU. It commemorates the outstanding contributions of the late nuclear physicist Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber. In 1950, she became the first woman Ph.D. physicist appointed to the Brookhaven Lab staff. She also was a founding member of BWIS.

Connors earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2005, and she expects to earn a Ph.D. in physics from SBU this summer. She is performing her research at the PHENIX detector, one of two large detectors at Brookhaven Lab’s world-class accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Specifically, she gathers and interprets data from PHENIX, which probes the quark-gluon plasma, the type of matter that is thought to have existed just microseconds after the Big Bang. After she earns her Ph.D., Connors plans to continue studying the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions as a postdoctoral fellow.

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Brookhaven National Laboratory is a multipurpose research
institution funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Located on
Long Island, NY, Brookhaven operates large-scale facilities for
studies in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, applied
science, and advanced technology. The Laboratory's almost 3,000
scientists, engineers, and support staff are joined each year by
more than 5,000 visiting researchers from around the world.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical,
biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security.
Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry
and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven
Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State
University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory
facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit applied science and technology organization.